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this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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Instagram showed me an ad for a medical condition I only discussed out loud, in person, in my doctors office.
Instagram was immediately uninstalled that day.
Your age group, sex, location, profession/industry, income estimation - you can assume they have this data.
That + a few data points that could be tracked by apps or websites:
Cross some of that, personal info, and ads of treatments for conditions of X.
They don't need to listen to your mic.
That said, if it's a fairly common condition, it might be the case you were presented the ad before and never noticed it.
None of those data points apply. It was nothing I had searched for or spoken to anyone until I saw the doctor that day and the Instagram ad was present by the time I had driven home, specifically mentioning the clinical term mentioned by the doctor.
It wasn't even the stated reason for my visit, it was an afterthought at the end of the appointment... "Oh yeah, as long as I'm here, what is this...?"
Other methods of data collection can be scarily effective. Stores have identified people were pregnant before they knew.
Very likely they identified you as someone that could have that condition, and you noticing the ads after talking to your doctor is a form of recency bias.
You can collect almost all the same data from traditional surveillance methods. Collecting and processing mocrophone data just isn't effective enough to make up for the massively increased costs from processing it.
It displayed the ad before I could get home and research it. It had only been discussed out loud and in person.
Did you connect to the clinic's WiFi?
Yes, I was on the wifi before the appointment.
This is why. Not because your phone is listening to you.
The wifi was not related to the medical issues, the symptoms, or the specific clinical term mentioned by the doctor.
But it's reasonable to believe other people would have searched the same topic on that network
Edit: or even that they looked it up o their own network following connecting to the clinic's.